


How the World Ends

by LectorEl



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, War Trauma, fucked up war orphans, kind of experimental, non-graphic reference to rape, old fic recently finished and cleaned up, where did the freedom fighters come from?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 07:20:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7213156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War eats people. Even civilians. Even children. It always has and it always will.</p>
<p>(You're seven when your world burns to ash.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the World Ends

You’re seven when your world burns to ash, ten and a half when a boy with smile like a blade offers you his hand. The less said of the years between, the better. You have enough nightmares. You wear your hair cropped short to your skull, and wear battered green robes stolen from someone’s clothesline. The days of pretty dresses are long behind you. You’re a freedom fighter now. But freedom’s a difficult thing to fight for. You’re ten and a half, with burns all down your front that long ago festered and rotted, and nightmares that smell of smoke and choking sparks. You don’t know what freedom means. Doesn’t matter, in the end. Fighting the Fire Nation’s easy.

The first time you kill a man you expect to feel something. The other freedom fighters warn you, _the first time’s the hardest_ , but the feeling of your knife finding its way home in a red clad back is purely physical. You can’t bring yourself to care, one way or another. The second time, something hot and hard blooms in your chest. By the seventh time, you recognize that feeling as satisfaction. And why not? They killed everyone you loved. They deserve to die.

You’re eleven when you realize the danger of being a girl in this world. You’ve seen soldier’s bastards before, the ones the soldiers keep, and the ones they discard. Small, pale bodies. Sometimes babies. Sometimes a little older. You’ve seen the pitying, hateful looks given to village girls with swollen bellies and no husbands in sight. When you were littler, a soldier tried to corner you, and you knocked him down and ran. But you’ve never quite put it together. Not till you see men in red grab an older girl and drag her off into a barn. You follow, and kill them. You weren’t quick enough to save her from his touch. You’re thirteen when another soldier does it to you, _be good for me little one_. An old women two towns over shows you what herbs to brew when you miss your course.

You’re fifteen when you realize something’s wrong with you. Village girls- untouched village girls- are getting married now. They coo over babies and twine flowers in their hair. They flirt and giggle and gossip over pretty boys, even in the middle of war. They’re pretty and sweet. The other ones – the unlucky ones – lurk out of sight, quiet, with dark-hollow eyes like the lights gone off. You get drunk on stolen beer, sleep in ditches and trees, kill soldiers in the night. Your burns stretch too-tight over your skin and ache when the wind blows wrong. They’re nothing like you, and you’re nothing like them, and you don’t want to be. You think the cold feeling in your chest, when you watch them, is what the others call hate.

You’re eighteen when the avatar comes through and ruins Jet’s plan to flood the village. He and his companions talk about guilt and innocence, and you don’t believe any of it. It’s as if they know nothing of war. The villagers are just as guilty as the fire nation. They cooperated instead of fighting. It’s so easy for them to say that was their only option. Resistance is always an option. You lost everything to the fire nation. If they assist the enemy, then they can lose everything for them too. Just like everyone else in this war has.

The freedom fighters disband. You’re cast out again, made to make your way in the world again, and your burns ache in the rain. You know how to fight, and how to kill, and how to run when you’re outnumbered. You can live off the forest. Your hair is cropped short, and your features rawboned from hunger. The festered, rotted burns stretch across where your breasts would be. You don’t look anything like those village girls. You don’t act anything like those village girls. You never have, and you never will. You keep fighting. It’s what you are, down to the marrow of your bones. You don’t know what else to be.

You’re nineteen, and getting drunk in some bar in the ass-end of nowhere when the fire lord attacks. Three villages are destroyed before the avatar stops him. One of them is the one Jet tried to destroy. You find out the news three days later, along with the rest of the refugees in this hellhole.

_The war is over_ , the messenger says. _Fire Lord Ozai is defeated_. It’s the first time you’ve heard your enemy’s name. You demand to know where he’s buried, so you can spit on his grave. He’s not dead. The avatar spared him. So you’re right, after all. The avatar knows nothing of war. If he did, he’d of ripped the Fire Lord’s heart out of his chest. So many people dead. But they don’t matter. Not to the avatar, anyway. He let the Fire Lord live, and a new one rise.

The next few weeks bring more messengers. Reparations, restitution, an era of peace and kindness. You laugh until you’re sick on the bar counter over the last one. Like any of those things are possible. The world is ash, and your burns ache when the wind blows from the west. How will they make these things better? Burn an equal number of fire nation villages to the ground? Match orphan for orphan, until the fire nation hurts as much as the earth kingdom hurts? Will the fire lord ensure that somewhere in the fire nation, another girl grows up with burn scars that ache in the breeze?

There’s talk of money to provide for soldiers wounded in the war, training programs to return them to civilian life, care for those too broken to be fixed. You don’t qualify for any of those.

_You’re not a soldier_ , the man dressed in fine new robes says. _You didn’t fight in the war. Go home. Grow your hair out. Get married._ You smile at him like Jet used to, sharp as a blade and just as dangerous. _Sure_ , you say. _I’ll do that. Can you direct me to the afterlife?_ He sputters, and you walk away. You didn’t expect any help anyway, you tell yourself. Village people are village people. They’ll never understand.

But it burns, oh spirits, how it burns. You want to see his blood spill down his fine new robe. Want to see him choke on it, blood frothing on his lips. Want to see the white bone of his ribcage as you tear out his heart. Your fingers itch for a coating of blood. But _the war is over_ , they tell you. You’re not allowed to kill your enemies anymore.

The next three months pass in a haze of alcohol. _Go home_ , the man said. But there’s no home to go to. No place in this new world for a woman who only knows how to kill.

You’re at another bar, dried blood down your front from a fight you don’t remember. You’ve been drinking for three days. You haven’t eaten for five. A man knocks into you. You snarl and pin him to the floor, knife poised to slice into the flesh of his belly.

_Hold_ , the women says. _Hold soldier_. She’s dressed in the red of the relief troops the Fire Lord’s sent, but her eyes are grey and her skin is tree-bark brown. That’s what make it okay to listen. You can always kill the man later, you reassure yourself. She squats so she can look you in the eye, ignoring the man pinned under you.

_I don’t think you really want to do that_ , she says. _Do you think you do?_ And it’s such condescending bullshit. Everyone in their shiny new robes with their blunted smiles and precious hope. Like the world didn’t end a hundred years ago. She’s just another one of those people. Just another village girl dressed in red.

_Yes_ , you say, baring your teeth _. I do. What do you think I want to do? Make peace?_ You spit the last word like it burns. Peace is a lie, told by people who never learned that life is war.

She raises a single brow and shakes her head. _Of course not. You want to kill me._ _You want to kill everybody dressed in red_ _._ _You want somebody, anybody, to hurt like you're hurting._

She catches your wrist while you're still staring, pulls you to your feet. _I'm taking her to the medic_ , she calls over her shoulder. _Don't wait up_.

In the end, it's the fire nation that takes you in.


End file.
